WOLF, David

This MP may have come from the family which had lived since the late thirteenth century at Ashington in west Sussex, although this was some distance from the borough he represented in Parliament. VCH Suss. vi (2), 66. Numbered among contemporary members of this family were John Wolf, the bailiff of the rape of Bramber in 1388, Suss. Arch. Collns. xxiv. 292. and customs official at Chichester in the early years of the fifteenth century, while another John served in Normandy in the retinue of Sir Reynold West (later Lord de la Warre), and attested Sussex elections to Parliament in the 1420s. By 1437 the latter was serving as steward of Lord Fanhope’s estates in the county. DKR, xliv. 628; C219/12/6; 13/3, 4; C67/38, m. 11. From this Ashington family also came William Wolf, who crossed to France in 1415 as a member of the earl of Arundel’s retinue, and went on to fight at Agincourt, Suss. Arch. Collns. xv. 127, 129. and Stephen Wolf (d.1475), a citizen and fishmonger of London, PCC 18 Wattys (PROB11/6, f. 136). who became one of the customers in Chichester in the mid century.

David Wolf’s relationship to these men, or, more importantly, to the John Wolf who had been party to the conveyance of a messuage in Midhurst in 1397, remains uncertain. CP25(1)/240/79/9. All we know about him besides his election to successive Parliaments in the early 1430s, is that he was described as ‘of Midhurst, soldier’ when allegations were made against him in the King’s bench in Trinity term 1434. The charge was that he had banded together with other men from the locality to break into the property of Margaret Morley at Midhurst in December 1432 (five months after his second Parliament had been dissolved), and had stolen goods worth ten marks. Nevertheless, when the sheriff of Sussex was ordered to make distraint on his possessions to bring him to court, he returned that Wolf owned nothing by which he might be distrained. The process began by which he was to be outlawed, but nothing further is recorded either about the case or Wolf himself. KB27/693, rots. 8d, 59; 694, rot. 59d. Perhaps he evaded further prosecution by enlisting for military service in France.